Healthcare deal-breakers for House conservatives

Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, formerly chaired the House Freedom Caucus, a conservative group that opposed the Republican-sponsored legislation to repeal and replace Obamacare. I spoke with him this week about why negotiations on the healthcare bill broke down and what comes next.

How did the American Health Care Act fall short of the Republican promise to repeal and replace Obamacare? It didn’t repeal Obamacare. … So it didn’t repeal all of the taxes, didn’t repeal all of the mandates, and it kept the Medicaid expansion and extended it for several years. There were some positive things in here, and we can build on some of that and we can even live with some it, but you have to get at the idea of actually bringing down premiums, bringing back affordable insurance. … Even [the Congressional Budget Office] said this bill wasn’t going to bring down premiums. They’re going to rise for the next 3 1/2 years, according to CBO.

And then, finally, the bill didn’t unite Republicans, didn’t unite Americans, as evidenced by the fact that you had every major conservative organization in the country oppose this. All kinds of conservatives in the House and Senate [had] concerns about this legislation. Probably most telling, and most importantly—only 17 percent of the American people thought this bill should be passed.

How do you respond to criticism that the House Freedom Caucus caused Obamacare to remain fully intact? The bill was simply postponed. The responsible thing to do is to get right back to work, which is what we’re doing. And we’re focused on one simple goal. I tell folks all the time, we make Congress too difficult. Our goal should be to do what we told the voters we’re going to do, do what they sent us here to do. And that is repeal Obamacare and replace it with something that actually brings down premiums and is patient-centered and family-centered healthcare.

Is there any solution between a full Obamacare repeal and the existing bill that the Freedom Caucus could accept? In the end, we said, look, if we can just get after the regulations that are actually driving up premiums for every single family out there—if we can get that much, then that’s something that would be worth passing. But in the end, we just weren’t confident that the legislation in front of us was going to do that.

Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, was displeased and left the Freedom Caucus over this. How united is the group in its position on healthcare? I don’t get into the details of what happens in our meetings. It’s a diverse group, but it’s a group of conservatives who are committed to our mission statement of doing what we told the American people we were going to do, of standing up and fighting for the countless number of Americans who feel like Washington has forgotten them. That’s what we talk about. That’s what we’re focused on doing. We have a vigorous debate when we get behind closed doors in our meetings and talk about where we want to go, and we don’t always take a position as a group, but we did have a significant number of our members who felt this legislation did not accomplish what the American people sent us here to do.

House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., said he thought you were close to a deal. Do you think you might still be able to get it done? I’m not sure. All I know is there weren’t the votes there last week, and there were a number of HFC members very concerned about the legislation, and, obviously, we expressed those concerns for a long period of time. We expressed concerns with the process, the idea that this bill was kind of rolled out—we were told it was a binary choice. There were no real hearings where you had witnesses. There were no amendments that were allowed to be offered in the committees when they had the markup of the legislation, and that’s not supposed to be how it works in our great system. … Good process leads to good policy, which leads to good politics. Sometimes when the process isn’t right, you don’t get the end result you want.

Do you feel President Donald Trump is willing to keep working with you toward a solution on healthcare? I think the president, just like all Republicans, is committed to getting rid of Obamacare and putting in place a model that brings down the cost of insurance.

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